Sixty Core I students will take part in a two to three mile trek from the main campus to the historic Franklin Haus tavern, located in the nearby village of Franklin. The hike, scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 18, is an early sesquicentennial event, and will be led by instructors of the participating classes—Joshua Kutney, Lucretia Crawford, John Yang, and Don Francis.

The hike will commemorate early students who trekked through the woods to Franklin Haus during free time from their studies at Missionhaus, according to oral history. The practice continued into at least the 1970s, after the school became Lakeland College, said Crawford, who attended Lakeland as an undergraduate during that time.

The hike will begin and end at the west entrance of Laun Center and will include some of the trails in Grether Woods on campus, as well as wooded areas and the edges of cultivated fields on private land. Dr. Kathleen Rath Marr, chair of the natural sciences division, which is responsible for Grether Woods, is formulating the route.

“The only hunting season that will be open during that time is bowhunting for deer,” she said. The college has dealt with that before, and Rath Marr knows where tree stands are located. Additionally, the event will be coordinated with private landowners to ensure there will be no conflict between the students and any hunters in the area.

As another precaution, students are being told they should wear bright-colored clothing.

The concept of the hike as a sesquicentennial event was the brainchild of Francis after he read a feature article in the Mirror last winter describing early ties between Lakeland and the nearby village.

“Missionhaus was in Franklin even before the first building was erected here,” he said. “Franklin is where the first classroom was located.”

The first few classes met in a house in Franklin owned by a pastor of the Lippe-Detmolder religious group — immigrants from Germany who settled along the bank of the Sheboygan River in the vicinity of Lakeland’s Grether Woods. The earliest settlement was known as the “Reineking encampment,” and members of that colony eventually built the village now known as Franklin, where the house still stands.

The building is still a private residence. It has been remodeled over the years, with a new wing added, but it retains the original classroom that evolved over the course of the next 150 years to become today’s Lakeland College.

Professor Joshua Kutney, who is in charge of the event, sees the hike as a good fit with the concept of Core I.

“The theme of Core I is ‘Knowing the self,’” he said. “We take that to be about identity — the identity of a Lakeland College student here in this lineage and history, but also the different frames of reference the students can use.”

Kutney added that one of those frames of reference is the history of those who came before. The unique relationship between Franklin and Lakeland serves to emphasize that.

“We hope that the historical context will raise some questions about how Franklin was used by the students,” said Kutney. “Was it an extension of their studies? A place for further conversation?”

The idea of Franklin — and the Franklin Haus — as an integral part of the learning process outside of the formal studies at Missionhaus is an important theme to the early history of, not only the school, but the geographical area. The story of Missionhaus cannot be fully understood without including Franklin, and vice versa, according to Kutney.

He hopes the commemorative hike will serve to raise such questions in the minds of the participants — while still showing them a good time.

Carol Rittenhouse, the current owner and operator of the Franklin Haus, is arranging activities for the students. “Bucket Brigade,” a race between two teams where lines are formed from the river to a fire pit up the hill to pass buckets of water and extinguish a fire, is one of them.

“That’s how things were done back at the time the original students were here,” Rittenhouse said. “Everyone had to pull together.”

The historical ties provided enough justification to schedule this month’s scenic trek, according to Francis.

When asked if it might become an annual event, Francis said “We’ll just have to see how this one goes.”